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Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Lose the Weight, Keep the Muscle

We have been involved with 5 studies conducted by a Team of researchers under the direction of Dr. Stuart Phillips of McMaster University. All the studies look to either maintain lean muscle mass or to increase it. Most of the work we have been involved with is looking at senior's health - really exciting the thoughts of keeping people active on trails and bikes, opposed to the alternative.

Here is a look at an article that talks to the efforts of the McMaster Research Team and Dr. Stuart Phillips. It was just posted recently in the Montreal Gazette by Jill Barker, and discusses their work with young men.

Lose the weight, keep the muscle:The new discussion around weight loss doesn’t judge success by the numbers on the scale. Instead the focus is on losing inches without losing muscle, a combination that’s hard to achieve by cutting calories alone.

Why is maintaining muscle so important? Contrary to fat, which stores energy, muscles burn calories which makes it a key player in keeping lost weight from coming back. It also preserves functional strength, which makes the chores of everyday life easier to accomplish. Yet traditional diets have been known to reduce lean body mass by 20-30 per cent.

The trouble with relying on both exercise and diet to lose unwanted weight is that both variables can be manipulated in thousands of ways. The Exercise Metabolic Research Group from McMaster University has been actively searching for the most effective combination of diet and exercise with their latest study bringing them one step closer to defining strategies for what Dr. Stuart Phillips, member of the Exercise Metabolic Research Group and Canada Research Chair in Skeletal Muscle Health, calls “high quality weight loss.” To read the full article, click here: Lose the weight, keep the muscle

We have seen clients from both Fitness Anywhere - Andrew Judson and CrossFit WHL - Bobby Tran see the same results; while being active, increasing their protein intake and watching the timing of the protein they have often lost weight while increasing their lean muscle mass and improved functional fitness.